The present invention relates to a rotary index system for stopping, at predetermined angle positions, articles to be inspected or treated which are being conveyed along a circular track and inspecting or treating the articles at these positions.
A rotary index apparatus is generally known to carry out a series of workings comprising, such as, the steps of receiving articles continuously conveyed, conveying the articles along a circular track, stopping the articles at predetermined angle positions during the conveyance thereof, inspecting the articles during the stay at those positions, and welding the articles to the other parts or members or assembling the articles in the other parts or members.
As one typical example of such rotary index apparatus, there may be proposed a bottle inspection apparatus. A conventional bottle inspection apparatus of one example of the rotary index apparatus includes a main disk plate, around which a plurality of recessed portions for accommodating beer bottles, for example, are formed. Two holding arms are disposed opposite to the recessed portions. The beer bottles conveyed along a conveyor are fed into the recessed portions by means of screw conveyors and accommodated therein. In accordance with the rotation of the disk plate, the beer bottles thus fed in the recessed portions are then conveyed to portions at which the beer bottles are inspected by means of cameras which inspect the beer bottles. The beer bottles after the inspection are transferred with equal intervals to a discharge conveyor and the beer bottles discriminated to be fault are taken out on a reject table by a proper rejecting means.
During the processes described above, the beer bottles are transferred from the screw conveyor to the main disk plate now being in a stationary condition and then intermittently conveyed to respective inspection stations by the intermittent rotation of the disk plate by predetermined angles. When the beer bottle reaches the camera inspection position, the inspection is performed with the disk plate of circumferential revolution stopped and the beer bottle rotated.
In another aspect, in a conventional rotary index apparatus for assembling precision parts or the like, the inspection or welding working of the precision parts is performed by mounting parts to be treated on predetermined positions of an indexing table intermittently rotated manually or automatically and by stopping intermittently the indexing table to a plurality of treating stations disposed along the periphery of the indexing table.
However, in the conventional rotary index apparatus of the characters described above, the main disk plate or the indexing table receives the articles to be treated from the conveyor with the rotation stop condition and transfers the articles treated at the respective stations to the discharge conveyor with the rotation stop condition. Therefore, the article cannot be smoothly conveyed in or out from the main disk plate or indexing table and, in an adverse case, the article may fall down, thus being difficult to stably operate the whole apparatus. In addition, the intermittently repeated rotations or stoppings of the disk plate or the indexing table imparts mechanical impacts to the disk plate or the indexing table at the respective rotation stopping and starting times. This also involves problems of durability of the apparatus and the operation speed thereof is not made high. This constitutes a significant problem for the apparatus.